Next: A Novel (40 page)

“Okay, okay, take it easy,” he said. “I have to arrange some things.”

“Will you go?”

“Yes, I’ll go. You want to give me a hint what this is about?”

“You’ll find it in the Burnet file. I assume it has to do with takings, by eminent domain or simple conversion.”

“Taking your cells?”

“They claim they own them.”

“How can they own your cells? They own your father’s cells. Oh, I get it. Same cells. But that’s bullshit, Alex.”

“Tell the judge.”

“They can’t violate the integrity of your body, or the body of your kid, just—”

“Save it for the judge,” she said. “I’ll call you later, find out how it went.”

She flipped the phone shut.

She looked down at Jamie. He was still sleeping, peaceful as an angel.

If Koch got to Oxnard by late morning, he might get an emergency hearing set for the afternoon.

She should probably call him around four p.m. That seemed a very long time away.

She drove toward La Jolla.

CH082

It’s the last thing we need, Henry Kendall thought. Visitors! He watched in dismay as Lynn threw her arms around Alex Burnet and then bent over to hug Alex’s kid, Jamie. Alex and Jamie had just shown up, with no advance warning. The women were chattering excitedly, arms fluttering, happy to see each other as they walked into the kitchen to get food for Alex’s Jamie.

Meanwhile, his son Jamie and Dave were playing Drive or Die! on the PlayStation. The sound of crunching metal and squealing tires filled the room.

Henry Kendall was overwhelmed. He walked into the bedroom to think things through. He had just come back from the police station, where he reviewed the playground security camera tape from the day before. The image quality wasn’t that good—thank God—because the image of that kid Billy kicking and beating his son was so upsetting he could hardly watch. He had to look away several times. And those other boys, that gang of skaters, they should all be in jail. With any luck, they’d be expelled from school.

But Henry knew it wouldn’t end there. It never did. Everybody sued these days, and no doubt the skater parents would sue to have their kids reinstated. They’d sue Henry’s family, and they’d sue Jamie and Dave. And out of those lawsuits it was sure to emerge that there was no such thing as Gandalf-Crikey syndrome, or whatever it was that Lynn had made up. It was sure to emerge that Dave was in reality a transgenic chimp.

And then what? A media circus beyond all imagining. Reporters camped on the front lawn for weeks. Chasing them wherever they went. Filming them with spy cameras day and night.

Destroying their lives. And around the time the reporters got bored, the religious people and the environmentalists would start in. Henry and his family would be called Godless. They’d be called criminals. They’d be called dangerous, and un-American, and a threat to the biosphere. In his mind he saw commentators on TV in a babel of languages—English, Spanish, German, Japanese—all talking, with pictures of him, and Dave, in the background.

And that was just the beginning.

Dave would be taken away. Henry could possibly go to jail. (Though he doubted that; scientists had been breaking the rules about genetic testing for two decades, and none had ever gone to jail, even when patients died.) But he would certainly be barred from research. He could be kicked out of the lab for a year or more. How would he support his family? Lynn couldn’t do it alone, and her web business would almost certainly dry up. And what would happen to Dave? And his son? To Tracy? And what about their community? La Jolla was pretty liberal (parts of it, anyway), but people might not be understanding about the idea of a humanzee going to school with their kids. It was radical, no doubt about it. People weren’t ready for it. Liberals were only so liberal.

They might have to move. They might have to sell their house and go somewhere remote, like Montana. Though maybe people would be even less accepting of them there.

These and other thoughts raced through his mind, to the accompaniment of cars squealing and crashing into each other, and his wife and her friend laughing in the kitchen. He felt overwhelmed. And in the middle of it, at the center of everything, was his deep sense of guilt.

One thing wasclear. He had to keep track of his kids. He had to know where they were. He couldn’t risk further incidents like the one that had occurred the day before. Lynn had kept the children at home for an extra hour, intending to let them go to school later, so there wouldn’t be any incidents with older kids. That Cleever kid was a menace, and it wasn’t likely he was jailed.

They’d probably just scare him and give him over to the custody of his father. The father, Henry knew, was a defense analyst for a local think tank and a hard-ass gun nut. One of those intellectuals who liked to shoot things. A manly intellectual. There was no telling what could happen.

He turned to the package he had brought home from the lab. It was marked TrackTech Industries, Chiba City, Japan. Inside were five inch-long polished silver tubes, slightly thinner than soda straws. He pulled them out and looked at them. These marvels of miniaturization had GPS technology built in, as well as monitors for temperature, pulse, respiration, and blood pressure. They were activated by a magnet that you touched at one end. The tip glowed blue once, then nothing.

They were designed to keep track of lab primates, monkeys and baboons. The tubes were inserted with a special surgical instrument that looked like an oversized syringe. They were placed under the skin of the neck, just above the clavicle. Henry couldn’t do that to the kids, of course. So the question was, where to put them?

He went back to the living room where the kids were. Drop the sensors in their school bags? No.

Down the collars of their shirts? He shook his head. They’d feel them.

Then where?

The surgical instrument worked perfectly. The devices went smoothly into the rubber at the heel of the sneaker. He did it for Dave’s sneaker, then for Jamie’s, then, on an impulse, went out and got a sneaker from Alex’s son, Jamie, as well.

“What for?” Jamie said.

“I need to measure it. Back in a sec.”

He inserted another device into the third sneaker.

That left two more. Henry thought about it for a while. Several possibilities came to mind.

CH083

The Hummer pulled up behind the ambulance, and Vasco got out. He walked up to the ambulance.

Dolly slid over onto the passenger seat.

“What’s happening,” Vasco said, as he got in.

Dolly nodded to the house at the end of the street. “That’s the Kendall place. You see Burnet’s car in front. She’s been in there an hour.”

Vasco frowned. “What’s goin’ on?”

She shook her head. “I could get the directional mike, but we have to be straight on to the windows, and I figured you didn’t want me to pull up closer.”

“Right, I don’t.”

Vasco leaned back in his seat. He gave a long sigh. He looked at his watch.

“Well, we can’t go in there.” Bounty hunters were permitted to enter the premises of the fugitive, even without a search warrant, but they could not enter the premises of third parties, even if they knew the fugitive was there. “Sooner or later,” he said, “they gotta come out. And when they do, we’ll be here.”

CH084

Gerard was tired. He had been flying for an hour since his last stop, which had been something of a disaster.

Shortly after dawn, he had landed at a complex of buildings where he smelled food. The buildings were made of wood with faded paint. There were old cars with grass growing up around them. Large animals made snorting sounds behind a fence. He stood on a fencepost and watched a young boy in blue coveralls walking out with a bucket in his hand. Gerard smelled food.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

The young boy turned. He looked around briefly, then continued on his way.

“I want food,” Gerard said. “I am hungry.”

The boy paused again. He looked around again.

“What’s the matter, don’t you know how to talk?” Gerard said.

“Yes,” the kid said. “Where are you?”

“Here.”

The kid squinted. He walked over to the fence.

“My name is Gerard.”

“No kidding! You can talk!”

“How thrilling for you,” Gerard said. He could smell the bucket strongly now. He smelled corn and other grains. He could also smell something else that smelled bad. But his hunger overwhelmed him.

“I want food.”

“What food do you want?” the kid said. He reached into the bucket and scooped up a handful of feed. “You want this?”

Gerard bent over, tasted it. He spit it out at once. “Yuck!”

“It’s chicken feed. Nothing wrong with it. They eat it.”

“Do you have any fresh vegetables?”

The kid laughed. “You’re funny. You sound like British. What’s your name?”

“Gerard. An orange? Do you have an orange?” He hopped back and forth on the fencepost, impatient. “I like an orange.”

“How come you talk so good?”

“I could ask the same of you.”

“You know what? I’m going to show you to my dad,” the kid said. He held out his hand. “You’re tame, aren’t you?”

“Sink me!” Gerard stepped on his hand.

The kid put Gerard on his shoulder. He started walking back to the wooden building. “I bet we can sell you for a lot of money,” he said.

Gerard gave a squawk and flew up to the roof of one building.

“Hey! Come back!”

From inside the house, a voice: “Jared, do your chores!”

Gerard watched as the kid reluctantly turned back to a dirt yard, where he tossed handfuls of the grain from the bucket onto the ground. A group of yellow birds clucked and jumped as the food was thrown to them. They looked incredibly stupid.

It took a moment before Gerard decided that he would eat that food, after all. He flew down and made a loud squawk to drive away the stupid birds, then started eating their grain. It tasted disgusting, but he had to eat something. Meanwhile the kid dived for him, hands outstretched.

Gerard flew into the air, pecked the kid hard on the nose—the kid screamed—and then dropped down a short distance away, to eat again. These big yellow birds were all around him.

“Get back! Get back, all of you!”

The yellow birds paid little attention. Gerard made the sound of a siren. The kid dived again, barely missing Gerard. He was obviously a stupid kid.

“Buffeting! Buffeting! Twenty thousand feet, buffeting! I am going to push the stick forward—”

Then the sound of a huge, air-shattering explosion. The chickens scattered at that, and he had a moment of peace, eating a little.

Now the kid was back with a net, and was swiping downward with it. That was too much excitement for Gerard, who was feeling sick in the stomach from the horrid food, so he flew quickly into the air, evacuating and hitting the kid perfectly on the head, before he climbed into blue sky and went on his way.

Twenty minutes later, in cooler air, he came to the coast and followed it. It was easier here, because there were updrafts, a blessing to his tired wings. He could not soar, but it helped nonetheless. He experienced a modest sense of peace.

At least, he did until some giant white bird—enormously huge, gigantic—rushed silently up at him, whooshing past, creating spinning turbulence that tumbled him out of control. When Gerard got his bearings again, the bird had glided away from him on huge flat wings. There was a single eye in the center of the head; it glinted in the sun. And the wings never moved; they just remained straight and flat.

Gerard was grateful there was not a flock of these birds, but instead only one. He watched as it circled slowly toward the ground below. And that was when he noticed the beautiful green oasis in the midst of the dry coast. An oasis! It was built at the site of a large cluster of huge boulders.

Surrounding the boulders were palm trees and luscious gardens and pretty buildings nestled among the green. Gerard felt certain that there would be food there. It was so inviting, he spiraled down.

It was a kind of dream. Beautiful people in white robes walking silently through a garden of flowers and shrubs, in the cool shade of palm trees, with all sorts of birds flittering about. He did not smell food here, but he was sure there must be some.

And then he smelled—orange! Cut orange!

It took him only a moment to locate another bird, brilliant blue and red, standing on a perch with lots of oranges all around him on a tray below. Oranges, and avocado, and bits of lettuce.

Cautiously, Gerard landed next to him.

“I want you to want me,” he said.

“Hel-lo,” blue-and-red bird said.

“I need you to need me.”

“Hel-lo.”

“Nice place you got here. My name is Gerard.”

“Aaah, what’s up, doc?” the bird said.

“Mind if I have an orange?”

“Hel-lo,” the bird said. “Aaah, what’s up doc?”

“I said, I would like an orange.”

“Hel-lo.”

Gerard lost patience. He went for the orange. The blue-and-red bird pecked at him viciously; Gerard dodged and flapped away with the orange in his mouth. He sat on a tree branch and looked back. That was when he saw that the other bird was chained to the perch. Gerard ate the orange at his leisure. Then he flew back for more. He came at the perch from behind, then later from the side. He flew in unexpectedly, each time dodging the bird, who could only say, “Hello!”

After half an hour, he was quite satisfied.

Meanwhile, he watched the people in white robes come and go, talking of NyQuil and Jell-O. He said, “Jell-O, the tasty dessert for the whole family, now with more calci-yum!” Two of the people in robes looked up. Someone laughed. Then continued on their way. This place was peaceful; the water gurgled in little brooks beside the path. He would stay here, Gerard felt certain, for a long, long time.

CH085

Okay, we got action,” Vasco said. Two young kids were coming out of the Kendall house. One was a dark kid in a baseball cap, sort of bowlegged. The other was fair, also in a baseball cap.

Wearing khakis and a sport shirt.

“Looks like Jamie,” he said, putting the car in gear.